Quick grants from tech billionaires aim to speed up science research. But not all scientists approve

Patrick Collison, the now 34-year-old billionaire CEO of the online payments company Stripe, and economist Tyler Cowen were chewing over a shared concern: Scientific progress seemed to be slowing down.

As the first pandemic lockdowns went into effect, researchers were waiting to hear if they could redirect their federal grants to COVID-related work. Collison and Cowen worried that the National Institutes of Health wasn't moving quickly enough, so they launched Fast Grants to get emergency research dollars to virologists, coronavirus experts and other scientists rapidly.

"We thought: Let's just do this," Cowen recalls. "It was a bit like put up or shut up."

Collison and his brother, John — a Stripe co-founder — contributed and along with Cowen raised more than $50 million from some of the biggest names in tech: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy.

The first round of grants went out in 48 hours, and later rounds were distributed within two weeks, a drastic difference from the hundreds of days a scientist typically waits to hear from the NIH.

Grants of $10,000 to $500,000 backed early efforts to sequence new coronavirus variants, clinical trials for drugs that could potentially be repurposed, and a simple and reliable saliva-based COVID-19 test. By January 2022, all the money had gone to more than 260 projects.

Fast Grants is one of many science improvement projects that Silicon Valley billionaires launched or backed since the pandemic began. Donors channeled hundreds of millions of dollars into research labs and nonprofits, arguing that scientists spend too much time seeking funding for grants that are too restrictive and see a need to support high-potential young scientists and risky or speculative projects that are often overlooked or underfunded.

Collison, along with Vitalik Buterin, creator of the Ethereum blockchain platform, and other donors pledged more than a half-billion dollars to the Arc Institute, a new biomedical research nonprofit that wants scientists to focus on science, not chasing grants.

Eric and Wendy Schmidt spun off Convergent Research, a nonprofit helping to incubate independent organizations to develop research tools and niche or underfunded areas of science.

While these contributions are just a drop in the bucket compared with the nearly $50 billion the NIH spends on research each year, they've been met with both applause and ambivalence.

Many of the experiments are similar to approaches already backed by government, leading some to question whether the money is well spent. Others question the societal implications when more science research is driven by a handful of tech elites motivated by the "move fast and break things" ethos.

"There is a sort of 'back to the future' element to what these guys are doing," says Eric John Abrahamson, a historian working on a book about science philanthropy. He sees parallels with Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who wanted to reimagine the institutions of science in the early 20th century.

The federal government became the majority funder of basic science research at universities and nonprofit research institutes in the post-World War II era. Today federal funding for basic science still exceeds the combined contributions from corporations, universities and philanthropy.

That margin is narrowing, according to National Science Foundation surveys: Nonprofit and philanthropic contributions for basic research increased from $1.5 billion in 1990 to $9.8 billion in 2020.

Contributions from higher education funds, which include money donors gave to university endowments in the past, increased from $1.9 billion to more than $14 billion in that same period. That growth is largely thanks to new philanthropies built on wealth from technology, data and finance, said France Córdova, president of the Science Philanthropy Alliance, which works to increase giving to science research.

Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science, which works to increase transparency in the research process, applauds donors for helping to shake up how science is funded.

Nosek is on the board of the Good Science Project, an advocacy group that's pushing government agencies to make their science grant making more innovative and efficient. Stuart Buck founded that nonprofit last year after a conversation with Collison. Collison and his brother, John, are its biggest benefactors.

Collison is also involved in the Arc Institute, which he helped launch in 2021 with $650 million pledged by more than a dozen other donors. The biomedical research organization provides scientists with no-strings-attached funding over eight-year terms to study the causes of complex diseases like cancer. Funding isn't tied to a particular project, so if scientists want to change course, their hands aren't tied.

Funding approaches that shield scientists from bureaucracy or allow a wider range of ideas to get support may be useful, said David Peterson, an assistant professor of sociology at Purdue University who studies how scientific organizations are evolving. 

Some scientists said they view these donors' approaches as an extension of the tech world's fixation with disruption, he said. "There is a feeling that science is another institution like the music industry or taxicabs that are ripe for fundamental transformation to make it much more efficient."